Six platforms where founders can learn from failed start

When Quibi, a short-video streaming service, announced in October 2020 that it was closing, it had raised US$ 1.75 billion and lasted about six months after launch. Its obituary now sits in an online cemetery beside a Belgian food-delivery firm and a Japanese company that built a laundry-folding robot.

Six places that keep the records: Of the six platforms, four are websites, beginning with Loot Drop (loot-drop.io), which lists more than 1,200 dead start-ups. Failory's Startup Cemetery, kept by a newsletter for founders, analyses over 120 closures and sorts them by cause. CB Insights, a research firm, has compiled 483 post-mortems written by founders and investors, while Startups.RIP, launched in April this year, covers more than 1,700 Y Combinator companies that shut down or were sold.

Fuckup Nights, one of two platforms that began offline, started in Mexico City in 2012, when friends swapped stories of business disasters, and has since travelled to more than 250 cities. The second is the Museum of Failure, which the psychologist Samuel West opened in Sweden in 2017 to exhibit failed products from large companies.

Bangladesh has very little of this, because most ventures here end quietly and the founder moves on without writing anything down. That is a waste, since the six archives show the same causes of death over and over, and eight of them are set out below.

Nobody needed the product: Juicero raised about US$ 120 million to sell an internet-connected juice press priced at US$ 699. After Bloomberg reporters showed in 2017 that its juice packs could be squeezed by hand, the company closed within months. When CB Insights went through 111 post-mortems in 2021, 35 per cent named the absence of a market need as a cause.

The cash ran out, and that was a symptom: Running out of money was the most-cited reason in the same study, at 38 per cent, although it is rarely the first thing that went wrong. Paperfly, the Dhaka logistics company, stopped taking orders in 2023 when expected funds did not arrive on time. A founder should, therefore, know well in advance when the cash will end.

Every sale lost money: Failory's cemetery holds a cluster of American meal-delivery firms, including Sprig, SpoonRocket, Maple and Munchery. Because cooking and delivering a meal often cost more than people would pay for it, growth only made their losses bigger.

A big funding round protected no one: Katerra raised roughly US$ 2.0 billion to modernise construction, yet it filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Convoy, a freight platform backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, shut down in 2023. Money buys time to find a business that works, but it also lets a company grow large before anyone has checked whether it does.

The business sat on someone else's platform: Lookery sold advertising inside Facebook apps, and PostRocket helped brands reach the followers of their Facebook pages. Both leaned on a single company, and both closed after that company changed its rules. The many Bangladeshi shops that exist only as a Facebook page carry the same risk.

The law caught up: Grooveshark, which streamed music without licences from the major labels, was sued out of existence in 2015. Failory files it under "legal challenges" alongside Theranos, the blood-testing company, and legal or regulatory trouble appeared in 18 per cent of the CB Insights post-mortems.

The team lost focus, or fell out: Wesabe, a personal-finance site that lost to its rival Mint, is filed under "bad management". One of its founders later wrote a frank account of the choices that sank it. In the CB Insights sample, 14 per cent of founders said they had the wrong team.

The timing was off: Vreal built a service for streaming virtual-reality games before enough people owned headsets, and HubHaus was renting out shared houses when the pandemic arrived. Both are filed under "bad timing", which is the kindest of the eight verdicts because the idea may still be sound.

What to do with a graveyard: Readers should keep two cautions in mind, because these archives lean heavily towards American, venture-funded technology firms and several are compiled with the help of AI. Loot Drop itself warns that its entries may contain errors.

A local habit would be more useful still, and Dhaka could begin with an archive of its own, a public file of closed ventures that is written by the people who ran them and kept by a university or trade body. If a founder who shuts a company publishes two honest pages about why, the next founder inherits something of real use.